MOC: Brickston Burough

35 posts in this topic

In the last few months I've seen a few very nice collections of Cafe-Corner-Compatible buildings.

Now it's my turn

Since more than two years I've been steadily expanding my collection of British buildings. It all started with 'A Taste Of India', built for a competition organised by the Brickish Association and I kept adding more. You'll have seen a few here on Eurobricks in the past. I displayed several of these buildings at the Great Western LEGO show in Swindon in 2008 as part as a larger collaborative layout. Obviously, with my return to the Netherlands in mid-last year, collaborative British/Brickish displays have become much more difficult. This is why I decided to build everything I need for my own little layout, which I decided to call Brickston Borough (after the London neighbourhood of Brixton).

Not only the buildings are modular. They rest on modular bases (16x16 stud segments). The roads are modular too, as is the railway viaduct. The whole layout can be packed into a few not too large boxes, which should make it fairly easy to take to events. The modularity also means that it will be relatively easy to build additional bits. I already have a lot of ideas for that, if not the parts

Anyway, I hope you like it so far!

Cheers,

Ralph

Edited January 19, 2012 by Phred

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

I saw this appear on flickr earlier. What an beautiful diorama! I'm already familiar with all the brilliant MOCs in there, except for the train, which looks great as well. The small park you added and the roads with the brick-built lettering are really nice touches.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Simply gorgeous! I've waited this CC-style "compilation" for a long long time and now I finally can see it I have just one word: BRAVO! Every single structure is just brilliant, and the most inspirating LEGO MOCs for a City lover like me. Thanks!

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Superb display Ralph. It's a perfect representation of a London street; I love the railway arches behind the shops. Even the traffic density is accurate! All it needs for super-realism is more police and a burst water main

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Thanks guys. Apart from the roads and the viaduct I already had all the MOCs. I had the intention of putting them all together, but I didn't have the parts for the viaduct until recently. When I put all of this stuff on the floor this morning, I hadn't seen it all together myself.

I built the train a few months ago, with this project in mind, and did post it on eurobricks too with a few pictures. However, it was in the train tech forum, which may explain why die-hard city heads may have missed it

For good measure, here's one:

It's a British Class 158 DMU in Southwest Trains livery.

There are obviously a few things missing that you would see in London: garbage in the street, pot-holes, police cameras and drunks and hoodies. I decided to go for a slightly cleaner version

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

That is spectacular! Very very realistic - I've seen each of these buildings individually, it's great to see them together in a layout. The train is also very realistic, the bridge section in red is very similar to one just down the road from my house! The only thing I could suggest that would make it maybe even more lifelike, is that where we have pedestrian crossings at junctions like that, we tend to have a pelican crossing with traffic lights, rather than a zebra crossing.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

From the railway to the old chip shop to the trad. London bus - you have out done yourself 'Ralph_S' !

Simply very beautiful and like I said beyond awesome - one the best I've seen in a real, real long time !

I&#39;m a conformist&#33; 'Ralph_S' I&#39;m a conformist&#33; !

One of the things I didn't like too much about one of the collaborative displays I contributed to was that there was nothing but tables behind the row of buildings lined up alongside the road. Because a lot of trains going into London run over the top of viaducts/ Victorian arches, building one of those seemed like a nice idea, and if you've got a railway track, you've got to have a train, right?

This is exactly the king of layout I would love to have. With a train, cars, lots of figs, and a number of buildings all in a small easy to display space. How large is this in terms of baseplates?

Reaper052

That's exactly what I was looking for too. I had a lot of fun working on collaborative displays, but I've seen other people build compact town displays somewhat like this one. The length of it is the equivalent of 6 32x32 baseplates. It's a bit more than 2 32-stud baseplates wide: 16 studs for the base of the viaduct, 32 for the modular buildings and roughly 20 studs for the road. Because the road was largely built with brick on its side it isn't attached to a baseplate.

I couldn't tell, but for super accuracy you should add some CCTV cameras. :D

There actually is one in the Corner Store, but indeed, there are a few typical London things I can add without necessarily adding seediness.

Looks fantastic, Ralph. Perfect blend of different buildings for a British street. Then all your great vehicles and that train just top it off.

Laurie

Thanks. When I built my first cafe corner compatible building, I also built two cars to go with it pretty much straight away. One of them (the black cab) is on the current layout. After that I went a bit overboard with the car building. We had so many of them for the collaborative display at STEAM (I built just about all the cars for it) that I ended up lending some to other Brickish members who had a large train display with a vacant parking lot. For this display I selected the ones that I felt seemed the most British.

Really nice MOC, and nice details. The little park with the statue is a very nice touch.

Thanks. I wanted a bit of green in there. For one of the collaborative displays a few years ago I had a park that was twice as large with a pond and a few trees, but for this city scene I wanted something a bit smaller (also because having a large park would mean building more roads.)

That is spectacular! Very very realistic - I've seen each of these buildings individually, it's great to see them together in a layout. The train is also very realistic, the bridge section in red is very similar to one just down the road from my house! The only thing I could suggest that would make it maybe even more lifelike, is that where we have pedestrian crossings at junctions like that, we tend to have a pelican crossing with traffic lights, rather than a zebra crossing.

Overall, a fantastic setup

Thank you. I looked at pictures of quite a few railway bridges before settling on red. It seemed like a nice bright colour to liven things up a bit. I will fiddle around with the traffic situation a bit more in the future. I'd love to have traffic islands with some trees in there too, but I completely ran out of old dark grey parts. I appreciate the comment.

Cheers,

Ralph

Edited February 21, 2010 by Ralph_S

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Amazing work Ralph! You 've created one of the best street scenes I've ever seen. I remember many of the creations being shown here (protection net--safety ON! ) and the key point in my opinion is the way you've combined them. The whole scenery looks full of life and that's the big success in my opinion.

I really like the fact that there are many colours in your creation, one more thing that makes it so great looking. The SNOT road is great and my personal favourites are the train, the truck with the trailer (I still would like to have this in my office at work! ) and the Georgian Houses. The whole bridge-arches structure turned out great too.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

It's fabulous! I can imagine the effort and also the time you must have spent to complete this perfect scene. But I guess the result was worth it! Even the smallest features are build with great detail and contribute to this brilliant layout.

A pleasure to look at!

~ Christopher

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Amazing work Ralph! You 've created one of the best street scenes I've ever seen. I remember many of the creations being shown here (protection net--safety ON! ) and the key point in my opinion is the way you've combined them. The whole scenery looks full of life and that's the big success in my opinion.

I really like the fact that there are many colours in your creation, one more thing that makes it so great looking. The SNOT road is great and my personal favourites are the train, the truck with the trailer (I still would like to have this in my office at work! ) and the Georgian Houses. The whole bridge-arches structure turned out great too.

Excellent work for once more and thanks for sharing it with us Ralph!

Thanks. I am glad you like the look of them all together. Regular LEGO road plates don't really lend themselves very well to being used with modular buildings, because they already have sidewalks. Putting the buildings on top of the road plates can work, but is still a bit awkward. In Brickish we tended to use road with brick on its side instead and I liked the look of it. It also means you get to add custom features, such as the markings for the bus stop. I enjoyed building the train because I am normally not a train builder. It was fun to do something a little different and I was pretty determined that it would look good. The HGV seems like a permanent fixture in British cities, although this one may be a little lost. There's certainly no way he make a turn! (Note the driver sitting on the left in the cab, he's probably Dutch!).

Quite simply fantastic!!

Needs some graffiti on the train & buildings though

Thanks.

I too think that right now things look a bit too prim and proper in some respects and I considered adding graffiti to the viaduct. Like in real life, however, I felt that graffiti ruins things. There's an added issue in that all the LEGO-built graffiti that I've seen and that I feel looks decent tends to be very big. Here's a sampling of LEGO-built graffiti on flickr:

That means adding it to the buildings isn't an option as there's simply no space for it. The same applies to the train, with the added note that I don't recall ever seeing graffiti on a train operated by Southwest Trains. It's very well possible, however, that with further extensions in the future, I will add bits of viaduct with some graffiti.

Hello!

It's fabulous! I can imagine the effort and also the time you must have spent to complete this perfect scene. But I guess the result was worth it! Even the smallest features are build with great detail and contribute to this brilliant layout.

A pleasure to look at!

~ Christopher

Thank you. This was all built spread out over a long time, with me building new parts for it now and then. I am no good at building something really large in one go. I prefer to break things up in smaller modules instead interspersed with building different unrelated things. That keeps a project like this interesting and I can spend the effort to make all the bits look decent by themselves.

I am fairly certain that I will keep adding bits to this in the future. Feedback I've been given here and on flickr has already given me a lot of new ideas.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

This is, undoubtedly, among the greatest Modular Streets to date! The individual buildings are nice, but the way they are all put together is the best part! The train tracks in the back add so much as well!

Link to post

Share on other sites

Thanks for blogging it and congratulations for becoming the new blogger for classic town

What? What the heck? Why isn't this frontpaged yet?

This is, undoubtedly, among the greatest Modular Streets to date! The individual buildings are nice, but the way they are all put together is the best part! The train tracks in the back add so much as well!